I remember attending a lecture from a famous quantum computing researcher in 2003. He said that quantum computing is 15-20 years away and then he followed up by saying that if he told anyone it was further away then he wouldn't get funding!

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Yoric a day ago | parent | next [-]

And now (useful) quantum computing is 5 years away! Has been for a few years, too.

	▲	oldgradstudent a day ago \| parent [-]
		Any day now.

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EA-3167 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It's an excellent time-frame that sounds imminent enough to draw interest (and funding), but is distant enough that you can delay the promised arrival a few times in the span of a career before retiring.

Fusion research lives and dies on this premise, ignoring the hard problems that require fundamental breakthroughs in areas such as materials science, in favor of touting arbitrary benchmarks that don't indicate real progress towards fusion as a source of power on the grid.

"Full self driving" is another example; your car won't be doing this, but companies will brag about limited roll-outs of niche cases in dry, flat, places that are easy to navigate.

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bhelkey a day ago | parent | next [-]

> companies will brag about limited roll-outs of niche cases in dry, flat, places that are easy to navigate

According to their website, Waymo offers autonomous rides to the general public in Austin, Atlanta, Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles [1].

* San Francisco is an extremely hilly city that gets a fair bit of fog.

* Los Angeles has notorious traffic and particularly aggressive drivers.

* Atlanta gets ~50 inches of rain a year, more than Seattle [2].

[1] https://waymo.com/faq/#:~:text=Where%20does%20Waymo%20operat...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2024/09/03/whi...

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plastic3169 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> ”Full self driving" is another example; your car won't be doing this, but companies will brag about limited roll-outs of niche cases in dry, flat, places that are easy to navigate.

Not expecting my car to be self-driving anytime soon, but I have understood there is actual working robotaxi service in San Francisco which is not easy or flat? I think we can’t keep saying self driving cars will never happen when this kind of thing already exists.

	▲	EA-3167 a day ago \| parent [-]
		It's true that SF isn't flat, but it's incredibly well mapped, it never snows and you don't have to worry about roads ravaged by frost-heaves. There's a reason that the new Doordash automated delivery service is starting off in Phoenix and not Boston for example.